Torch (14 page)

A
T FIVE IN THE MORNING
Claire took a long bath. She closed her eyes and almost dozed off, then woke, confused, believing for an instant that she was in her apartment in Minneapolis. But she had been home, in Midden, for two weeks, shuttling back and forth to the hospital in Duluth to sit with her mother, trading off shifts with Bruce. He took the nights; Claire, the days. In the dark of each evening she’d return home exhausted, but then she would not be able to sleep. She would walk through the house turning on lamps in rooms she wasn’t using, and then walk through them again turning them off. She cuddled with the dogs; pulled with mock enthusiasm on the knotted ropes they’d offered her to play tug of war. She’d wish that Joshua would come home and talk to her, though on the couple of occasions he did come home, she wished he’d leave.

She got out of the tub and dressed by the light of the candle that burned from an old wine bottle on the edge of the tub. Several minutes before, she’d heard Bruce’s truck driving up the driveway, and then she heard him come into the house. Joshua was home too, still asleep. She switched the bright light on and watched herself in the mirror, solemnly brushing her wet hair. She thought of her mother, alone at the hospital, an unbearable thought. Usually Claire tried to be at the hospital by now, but this morning she had trouble making herself get out of the tub.

“How is she?” Claire asked when she walked into the kitchen.

“The same,” said Bruce.

It was dawn, but dark still. She opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of eggs. “As when? As yesterday?”

“As yesterday.” He sat at the table drinking coffee from the small metal cup that went with his Thermos.

She made scrambled eggs and toast and put it on two plates and set
them on the table. Bruce made a sandwich with his and dug into it hungrily with big bites, his elbows resting on the table.

“So, when you mean the same as yesterday, how do you mean?” she asked, not touching her food. “Because actually she was fine when I left last night, though she’d had some rough patches during the day.”

Bruce set his sandwich down. He looked at her and his face got tight as though he were about to say something, but then he didn’t, and instead he reached over and rubbed Claire’s shoulder.

“She’s very tired,” he said after a while.

Yesterday Teresa had begun to say strange things, to see people who were not there, to insist the phone was ringing when it wasn’t. One of the doctors had asked Claire to go out into the hall with him so he could tell her “it didn’t look good.” She had gotten into an annoying conversation with him that centered around her trying to get him to define his terms. All of them. What did
it
mean? What did
look
mean? What did he mean by
good
? Teresa had been admitted into the hospice section of the hospital a couple of weeks ago not because she was dying, but because all of the beds in oncology were full, but now that there were beds available, the doctors had decided that there was no use in moving her.

Joshua came into the kitchen dressed, but hardly awake, his hair poking out in different directions. “Morning,” he said.

“There are eggs for you,” Claire said, gesturing toward the stove.

Joshua got himself a plate and scooped the eggs from the pan and sat down at the table.

“You can go with me today, Josh. Mom will like that.”

He slowly chewed his toast, which was covered with chokecherry jam that Teresa had made last fall. “I was gonna go and see Randy about that truck.”

“You can go and see Randy later,” Claire said. She looked at her brother steadily while he continued to eat. “Please,” she said. “Pretty please.” And then when he kept eating without saying he would go, she said viciously, “Some things are more important than trucks. Mom is more important than a truck.”

“I need a truck. I
told
you yesterday. I’ll go to be with Mom tomorrow.” He looked at her for several moments, trying to out-stare her. Her earrings were silver hands that turned, caught in her hair.

“Your mom would want to see you,” Bruce said lightly.

“Which is why I’m going tomorrow.”

Claire put a bite of eggs into her mouth, but had to force herself to swallow them, like a handful of soft pills. She was aware of the fact that though she was eating, she seemed like a person who was pretending to eat. She stood and scraped her plate into the dogs’ dishes. Spy and Tanner rumbled into the room and the eggs were gone in an instant.

“I’m going,” she called, putting her coat on.

“I’ll see you around eight tonight,” Bruce said.

“Yep.”

“I told you I couldn’t go today, so don’t be acting like this,” Joshua said.

“I’m not acting like anything,” said Claire. Sometimes she hated Joshua’s guts. She considered telling him this:
I hate your guts
. They had said it to each other before, when they were kids. She’d put her coat on in a huff, but now she pulled her boots on in a calmer fashion, as if to demonstrate that she wasn’t going to let him get to her.

“Your car been running okay?” asked Bruce.

“Yeah.” She walked to the door and opened it. “Bye,” she hollered back.

“The roads’ll be slick,” Bruce said.

“Tell Mom hi,” said Joshua as she shut the door.

It took ninety-five minutes to drive to Duluth in March. Claire had it timed. Seven minutes to the blacktop, thirteen to Midden, then an hour and fifteen minutes straight east to Duluth. Mostly she was the only one on the road. When a car drove by she waved to whoever it was and they waved back, and as she got closer to Duluth more and more cars passed her and fewer and fewer people waved until she was in the light morning traffic of downtown and she didn’t wave at anyone at all.

She parked her car near St. Benedict’s Hospital. When she approached the doors, they whooshed open with a hot gust of air. She passed the information kiosk, the flower shop, the coffee cart, and the gift store, and went straight to the elevators that took her four floors up to her mother’s room.

“You look pretty,” Teresa said when Claire walked into the room. “You look like Little Red Riding Hood.” Her eyes were open and clear. Now that her mother was on morphine, Claire never knew what to expect. Teresa could be in a near stupor and then shift back to her old self within an hour.

“I wore your coat.” Claire stood at the end of the bed and rubbed
the tops of her mother’s feet. It was the only place she could get at freely, without the tangle of tubes and plastic bags of fluid and tall carts holding the machines that sat near her head.

“That was always my favorite,” Teresa said. “I wore it ice-skating when I was a teenager.”

Claire pushed her hands into the pockets of her mother’s old coat, red wool. The room was packed with flowers in vases and it smelled like them, black-eyed and exuberant, angular and bright.

“You wore it other times too. I remember you wearing it all the time.”

“I wear it to feed the chickens. And the horses. It’s my barn coat.”

“I know,” Claire said, afraid now, thinking that her mother was becoming delirious again, despite the fact that everything she said was true. Yesterday she’d sworn that someone named Peter had attempted to shave her legs. Claire sat down and took the coat off and picked up a book she’d been reading and removed a pressed leaf from the page where she’d left it to mark her place. She twirled the dry leaf by its stem and held it up. “What’s this?” she asked, to test her mother’s mind.

“A leaf.”

“Yeah, but what kind of leaf?”

Teresa took a deep breath and held it, as if she were doing yoga, and then she let it out slowly. “Aspen,” she said, looking at Claire and not the leaf. Her arms were utterly unmoving on the bed, her wrists swaddled in gauze to keep the IV lines secured. “Otherwise known as poplar.”

“Correct,” Claire said, although she did not know whether it was an aspen leaf or not, having never bothered to learn such things.

“
Populus tremulus,
” Teresa said in Latin, dragging the syllables out. On
Modern Pioneers
, she’d done a whole show about the botanical names of common northland trees and grasses. She’d quizzed Claire and Joshua and Bruce on several of them the week before the show. Claire tried to remember one now, to demonstrate to her mother that she’d been paying attention, but she couldn’t.

“Where’s Bruce?”

“He left a couple of hours ago, Mom. He has to go to work. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh,” she said. “Now I remember. I thought I dreamed it. Where’s Josh?”

“He said hi. He’ll be coming tomorrow.”

She began to straighten the objects that sat on the little table so she wouldn’t have to look at her mother. A tube of lip balm, a box of Kleenex, a cup of warm Gatorade. It had been two weeks since her mother had been admitted to the hospital and Joshua had not come to visit even once.

“I brought something for you,” she said after a while, searching through her backpack. She pulled out a lollipop made of honey and ginger that she’d bought at the health food store, and handed it to her mother.

Teresa hadn’t eaten for three days. The radiation treatments had started decomposing her stomach and she vomited pieces of it up into a yellow pan that was clipped to the side of her bed.

“Thank you,” Teresa said. She held the lollipop, shaking, and brought it slowly to her mouth. Large blisters had formed on her lips, burnt by the acid of her stomach. “Maybe this will make me feel better. Ginger is what you should have when you’re pregnant, by the way. It’s a natural cure for nausea.”

“I know.” And she did know—that, too, had been on
Modern Pioneers
. “So is peppermint,” she said and Teresa smiled in recognition. Claire pushed an IV stand back toward the wall so she could stand near her mother and stroke the top of her head. Her hair was sharp and dry like the weeds that grow flat along the cracks in rocks.

“Oh,” Teresa moaned. “Don’t touch me. It hurts. Everything hurts. You wouldn’t believe the pain.” She closed her eyes; held the lollipop. “Let’s sit and not say anything. That’s what I want more than anything. To be together and rest.”

Claire took the lollipop from her mother’s swollen fingers. She held it for a while and then began to eat it herself.

Teresa lay with her eyes closed. Her face was flushed, feverish-looking. At other times it was as pale as snow. Claire considered singing a lullaby, but she didn’t know more than a few words of one or two. Her mother hadn’t sung lullabies to her and Joshua that she could remember. She’d sung other songs, funny songs, songs with lyrics she made up as she went along. Or sad songs by Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris. Claire didn’t think her mother wanted to hear these songs now, so she stood at the foot of her bed and sucked the lollipop and listened to her breathe, waiting to hear the breath that meant that she was sleeping. When this breath finally came, Claire watched her mother’s face for signs of relief,
which did not come. Her face had an expression of permanent tension. Claire could not discern whether this was a new thing, because of the cancer, or if that expression had been there all along, masked by the ordinary light of day. Teresa’s chin hung slack, making the flesh beneath it baggy, but her mouth was strangely alert, puckered, and faintly streaked with vomit. Claire thought of the TV commercials of starving children, how the flies gathered at the corners of their eyes, but the kids were too weak to swat them away. How unbearable it was to see that, more so than anything else, more so than all the other things, lack of food, lack of water, lack of love, which were so much worse.

She got a washcloth and wetted it and delicately wiped her mother’s face.

“Thank you, honey,” Teresa said, without opening her eyes, without moving or giving any other indication that she was awake. And then she said, “I was thinking about a lot of different things last night. Like that time that I locked myself in the bathroom.”

“What time?”

“You remember the time.” Teresa opened her eyes and looked at Claire.

“I don’t remember any time.”

“I was furious with you and Josh. You were about five. I don’t know what the two of you did. Probably a combination of things.”

She smiled at Claire. Her beauty, even then, was like a Chinese lantern hanging in an oak tree.

“It was just before I finally left your father. Anyway. Nobody tells you how it will be. I was so furious that I wanted to hurt you. I mean,
do you physical harm
. Well, I didn’t
really
, and I wouldn’t have, but right then and there I felt
capable
of it. They don’t tell you that when you become a mother—and nobody wants to talk about it—but everyone has a breaking point, even with children.
Especially
with children.” She laughed softly. “So. I went and shut myself into the bathroom to calm down.”

“That was probably good,” Claire said passively. She was sitting on the vinyl couch, the damp washcloth next to her.

“Oh, were you ever mad! Just seething. You couldn’t bear that I wouldn’t let you in. You hurled your body against the door with all your might. I thought you would hurt yourself. I thought you were going to break a bone. I had to come out so you wouldn’t.”

She kept a smile on her face, gazing at Claire for a long time. After
a while she said, “Sometimes I would think crazy thoughts when you and Josh were babies. Things I wouldn’t do, things that would come into my head from out of nowhere.”

“Like what?”

“Like awful things. Like I would be chopping vegetables and I would think I could chop your heads off.”

“
Mom!
”

“I wasn’t going to do it, but the thought came into my mind. I think it’s natural. Nature’s way of helping me adjust to the responsibility.”

Claire laid the washcloth to dry on the wooden arm of the chair. She said, “When Shadow was a kitten and I would carry her around, I would get this feeling that I would drop her and it would freak me out until I set her down.”

“Yeah. It’s sort of like that. Not what you
want
to do, but what you
could
do.”